The Two-Front War
Anja relayed her findings in a series of urgent, clipped whispers, the glow of the terminal screen still burned into her memory. "Two objectives," she concluded, her voice tight with the enormity of their discovery. "The seed bank is in a vault directly beneath Voss's command hub. Heavily fortified. And the kill switch for this entire garden—a single water intake valve—is in a service tunnel one level below us."
Jaya absorbed the information, her expression a mask of cold, tactical fury. She looked from Anja to Kenji, her mind already moving pieces on a battlefield. "Two targets. Two kill-shots. One to their future, one to their present."
"We can't get to both," Kenji stated, his voice a low, pragmatic rumble. "The vault is in the most secure part of this fortress. The service tunnel will be a maze. We'd need two teams, and there are only three of us."
Assessing the Options
A heavy silence fell over them, broken only by the distant hum of the hydroponics systems and the occasional drip of condensation from overhead pipes. They were crouched in the shadow of a massive support pillar, hidden from view but acutely aware that time was running out.
"Let's think through this," Kenji said, his scout's pragmatism taking over. "What are our actual options here?"
Jaya's jaw worked as she forced herself to slow down, to consider rather than simply react. "Option one: We go for the vault. Extract the seed bank. It's their future—every viable crop strain they have. Without it, even if they recover from an attack, they'll never be able to rebuild their food supply."
"But we leave the garden intact," Anja finished. "They still have months of food growing here. Enough to sustain them, enough to launch another attack on us."
"Option two," Kenji continued. "We poison the reservoir. Kill everything growing here. It's immediate, devastating. But we leave the seed bank intact, which means they can eventually replant."
"Neither option is complete," Anja said, frustration creeping into her voice. "We either hurt them now or hurt them later, but not both."
"Option three," Jaya said, her voice hardening. "We split up. Hit both targets simultaneously."
The Warrior's Gambit
"Then we split," Jaya elaborated, the decision sharpening into focus. The raw, aggressive instinct that had guided her for years surged forward. "I'll go for the vault. You two," she nodded at Anja and Kenji, "go for the valve. We move fast. We hit them hard. We cut the head off the snake and burn its nest at the same time."
Anja's blood ran cold at the thought. "Jaya, no. Splitting up is suicide. You saw the guards. This place is a fortress. If even one of us gets caught, the alarm is raised, and the others are trapped. The Cooperative gets nothing."
"A risk worth taking," Jaya countered, her eyes flashing with barely contained fury. "The chance to cripple them, to tear out their heart, is right here, right now. We may never get this opportunity again."
Jaya's Internal War
She could feel it—that old familiar pull. The warrior's instinct that had kept her alive through countless battles, that had made her the Cooperative's most effective defender. Every fiber of her being screamed to act, to strike, to make the enemy bleed for what they had done.
Images flashed through her mind: Tomas's body wrapped in sailcloth. The children coughing from the poisoned water. Leo's maimed arm. The red tide spreading through their bay like a disease, carefully calculated and deployed. All of it Voss's doing. All of it planned from this very fortress.
And now she was here, inside their heart, with the power to destroy them.
How could she walk away from that?
But another voice spoke up—quieter, newer, but insistent. The voice of the commander she was learning to become. The voice that sounded uncomfortably like Rupa.
A dead warrior completes no missions. A captured team surrenders all intelligence. Revenge that costs everything accomplishes nothing.
Kenji's Assessment
"Jaya," Kenji said carefully, his tone respectful but firm. "I need you to hear me as your scout, not as someone questioning your command."
She turned her fierce gaze on him, and he didn't flinch.
"I've been mapping this place since we entered. Every corridor, every junction, every guard patrol. The vault is in the most heavily defended section of the refinery—I saw at least six guards within fifty meters of it when we passed through. The service tunnel is on the opposite side of this level, through a maze of passages we haven't scouted."
He paused, letting that sink in. "If we split up, you're going in alone against multiple armed guards. No backup. No escape route if things go wrong. Anja and I would be navigating unmapped territory, also without support."
"I can handle six guards," Jaya said, but there was less certainty in her voice now.
"Maybe," Kenji acknowledged. "On the Cooperative's platforms, with clear sight lines and room to maneuver, I'd bet on you against a dozen. But in close quarters, in unfamiliar territory, with mag-locked doors and unknown security systems?" He shook his head. "The odds aren't good. And if you go down, we lose our best fighter, our mission commander, and any chance of getting this intel back home."
Anja's Calculations
Anja's mind was racing, running scenarios the way her father had taught her to analyze structural problems. Multiple variables, interconnected systems, cascading failures.
"There's another factor," she said quietly. "We don't know how long we have before we're discovered. The terminal I accessed—I wiped the immediate logs, but if anyone checks the system activity records in detail, they'll see the access. We could have hours. We could have minutes."
She looked at Jaya. "If we split up and one team gets caught, the alarm goes up immediately. The other team has seconds to either abort or push forward into a fully alerted fortress. Either way, the mission fails."
"But if we stay together," Jaya argued, "we can only hit one target. That's a guaranteed partial failure."
"No," Anja said, the pieces clicking into place in her mind. "It's a guaranteed success at one objective. That's not the same thing."
The Strategist's Plea
"The opportunity we came for was intelligence," Anja continued, her voice gaining strength she didn't know she possessed. She held Jaya's fierce gaze, refusing to back down. "The mission wasn't to destroy them tonight. It was to find a way for the Cooperative to survive tomorrow. We have that now. We have the location of the seed bank, we have the codes, and we know how to destroy their food supply. This information is more valuable than any single act of sabotage we could commit right now."
She gestured around them at the vast, humming garden. "This is their strength, but the information is our weapon. A weapon we can't use if it dies with us in these tunnels. We have to get it back to Rupa. The primary mission comes first."
The Strategic Vision
"Think about it," Anja pressed, her engineering mind laying out the logic. "We take this intel home. Rupa knows where the vault is, exactly how it's defended, what the access codes are. We know how to poison their entire food supply through a single valve. We know the layout of this place, the guard patterns, the weak points."
She could see it unfolding in her mind like one of her father's infrastructure diagrams. "The Cooperative can plan a proper assault. Multiple teams, coordinated. We can hit them when they're weakest, when we're strongest. We can bring tools, weapons, backup. We can do this right instead of rushing it now when we're outnumbered and exhausted."
"And if they change the security codes?" Jaya challenged. "If they move the seed bank? If they realize we were here and reinforce everything?"
"Then we adapt," Anja said. "But at least we'll be alive to adapt. At least the Cooperative will know what they're facing. Right now, attacking from ignorance is how people die. Retreating with intelligence is how wars are won."
The Weight of Choice
Jaya stared at her for a long moment. Anja could see the conflict written across her face—warrior battling commander, instinct battling reason, the desire for immediate vengeance battling the need for long-term strategy.
"If we walk away now," Jaya said slowly, "and they attack us again before we can organize a counter-assault... if more people die because we had a chance to strike and didn't take it..."
"Then we live with that," Anja said, her voice softer now. "But if we attack now and fail, if we get caught or killed, then everyone dies because we had the intelligence to save them and threw it away for revenge."
She thought of Sami. Of Parvati. Of all the children on the school barge. Of Rupa trying to hold the community together with nothing but hope and determination.
"We're not fighting for revenge, Jaya. We're fighting so our people can survive. And right now, survival means getting this information home."
Each Considers Failure
Kenji spoke into the heavy silence. "I need to say something. As the one who'd have to guide us through both operations."
Both women looked at him.
"If we split up and it goes wrong, I'll be the one who has to tell Rupa that we had mission-critical intelligence and lost it—and lost our best warrior—because we got greedy. I'll be the one explaining to the families that their loved ones died not to save the Cooperative, but to satisfy our need to hurt the enemy."
He looked at Jaya directly. "I'll follow your orders. You're the commander. But I'm asking you to think about what you'd want me to tell people if this goes bad. Because I'm the scout. I'm the one who survives to make reports."
The words hung in the air like a death sentence.
Jaya closed her eyes. Behind her lids, she saw two futures:
In one, she charged the vault alone, fought her way through guards, seized the seed bank in a moment of spectacular heroism—and got cut down, or captured, or trapped, leaving Anja and Kenji to escape with partial intelligence while she died in failure.
In the other, she swallowed her pride, accepted the strategic reality, and led her team safely home with intelligence that could end this war properly. No glorious last stand. Just competent command.
Which future would Tomas want? The friend she'd failed to save because they hadn't known the enemy was coming?
Which future would Rupa need?
The Commander's Decision
Jaya opened her eyes. The war raging behind them had settled into grim resolution.
Her gaze drifted across the bay to a far corner where she could just make out the silhouette of what had to be Voss's command center—the stolen pulse rifle would be somewhere in there, a stark reminder of his strategic cruelty. He hadn't just attacked them; he had out-thought them. Multiple times.
Brute force was a fool's game.
Anja was right. This was a war of strategy, and the most powerful move now was not to attack, but to retreat and regroup with a winning hand.
She finally let out a slow, frustrated breath, the fight visibly draining from her. The decision was a physical weight, pressing down on her shoulders like armor that no longer fit. "You're right," she conceded, the words tasting like ash in her mouth. "The mission was intel. We get the intel out. Sabotage is a secondary objective. We don't risk the primary."
She looked at Kenji, then at Anja, and in her eyes was something new—a hard-earned respect, and perhaps the first true acceptance of what it meant to be a commander rather than just a warrior.
"We're getting out of here. Now."
The Acknowledgment
But before they moved, Jaya did something that surprised even herself. She reached out and gripped Anja's shoulder.
"You were right to argue," she said quietly. "A good commander surrounds herself with people who will challenge her when she's wrong. I was wrong. My anger—" she paused, struggling with the admission, "—my anger was making me stupid. Strategic stupidity gets people killed."
She released Anja's shoulder and turned to Kenji. "And you were right to remind me what matters. Not glory. Not revenge. Just getting our people what they need to survive."
"We'll come back," Anja said. It wasn't a question.
"We will," Jaya confirmed. "With a proper force. With a real plan. And we'll take everything from them—their food, their seeds, their future. But we'll do it smart."
She allowed herself one last look at the hydroponics bay, at the lush green that represented months of growing while the Cooperative starved. The warrior in her screamed to burn it all down right now.
But the commander—the one who was finally learning to think beyond the next fight—knew that patience was its own kind of weapon.
"Let's move," she ordered. "Our people are waiting for us to come home."
The Retreat
The decision made, the team moved with a renewed, singular purpose. They slipped from the monitoring station's shadow, melting back into the rows of dying planter boxes near the maintenance vent. Kenji went first, a silent ghost, securing the exit. Anja followed, her mind a dizzying whirl of schematics, codes, and the terrifying weight of the information she now carried.
As she prepared to climb back into the suffocating darkness of the duct, she took one last look at the glass garden. The vibrant green, the steady, artificial sunlight, the quiet hum of life—it was all a beautiful, intricate lie. A sanctuary built on a foundation of murder.
We'll be back, she vowed, a silent promise to the ghosts of Sonapur and to everyone the Cooperative had lost. And we will turn your garden into a graveyard.
With a final, backward glance, she pulled herself into the duct, leaving the sanctuary of lies behind and plunging back into the cold, honest darkness of the veins of iron.